Exodus 20, page 7
Diego surged forward and sealed their mouths together. “Because you’ll keep me.” He quite liked the idea of being kept.
“Because you’re mine,” Ariel rumbled.
Ariel carried him out of the nave and propped Diego against the shower wall, let lukewarm water rain down on them. Fucked him hard and fast while Diego cried out, eyes unfocused and pinned to the dewy ceiling, mumbling incoherently, “Por favor, más dura, no pares.” After that, they tangled together in cotton sheets, and Diego found himself straddling an angel—a fucking angel—thanking a God he barely knew, discovering faith in damp skin and pearlescent feathers.
So many things he’d been, so many things he’d become.
Caged, kept, coyote, sinner, idol.
Diego López kissed an angel—his angel—until dawn pinkened on the horizon.
THE FIRST SERVICE at Catedral de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe began at eight o’clock, sharp.
People arrived in dusty sedans and pickup trucks. Most wore Sunday best, dressed in collared shirts and ankle-length skirts, but some carried remnants of late-night shifts on their work clothes. Abuelas and parents quieted grandchildren, and tías fixed crooked ties. Hushed chatter fluttered through the nave, and Diego López stood in the corner, sipping coffee as families streamed inside and filled the pews.
Strange, standing in the aftermath of a rebuilt sanctuary. He’d thought the work wouldn’t be done—couldn’t be done—but there he was, watching light glint off holy water, rippling with every tap from a welcomed fingertip, and there they were, the faithful who’d come to worship, searching for a lost God in a once abandoned place.
Tomorrow, Diego would guide a group of travelers through the underground tunnel beneath the church. He’d arrange overnight stays for most and send coordinates for reunions with family or friends for the lucky few with rendezvous plans. He’d serve mole de panza with thickly sliced sourdough. Provide safe labor for people who were ready to work and direct families to housing organizations who could help them get settled. He’d pray with them too. Reach for an angel, he’d say with conviction, with power. Someone is listening, someone will hear you, someone will find you.
The double doors clicked shut, and Diego snuck into the very last pew, watching colored light stream across the floor where he’d knelt, and lain, and prayed.
The pastor took his place behind the pulpit and flicked open a well-loved leatherbound Bible. “Buenos días,” he said. “Que Dios esté con nosotros.”
The pew creaked beside him, adjusting to the weight of another body. “Amen,” Ariel said and rested his hand on Diego’s thigh.
Diego traced Ariel’s thumb and turned toward the window, half listening as the sermon began. Decorating the glass, the Blessed Mother stood with her palms pressed together in prayer, and in the thin reflection, a glimmering wing extended from Ariel’s back and stretched protectively over Diego’s shoulder.
You listened, Diego thought, and smiled as Ariel kissed his knuckles. You found me.
Acknowledgements
I’m extraordinarily grateful to have built this novelette from a mere idea to a published piece. Guided by friends, early readers, and inspirational peers—Aveda Vice, R.M. Virtues, Elle Porter, Eli, Jen, Hester Steel, Magen Cubed, Harley Laroux, DC Guevara—and my editorial team at NineStar Press, I’ve been allowed the privilege to make my work available to readers everywhere. Soy Freydís. Estoy aqui para quedarme. Gracias, mi gente.
About Freydís Moon
Freydís Moon (they/them) is a biracial nonbinary writer and diviner. When they aren't writing or divining, Freydís is usually trying their hand at a recommended recipe, practicing a new language, or browsing their local bookstore. They are on Twitter @freydis_moon
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Three Kings
Ethan Shaw carried two knives, one for lilies, the other for veins. The blade in his left hand curved like a smile, clipping stems at a sweet, diagonal angle. The second weapon was concealed in a petite leather sheath, tucked neatly in his right palm.
The ritual called for innocence, and he had none to spare, so he searched the shoreline for white-petaled flowers—speckled with saltwater, yawning toward the sky—and remembered the folktale that wormed through Casper, spoken quietly at the pub, hollered by sailors on the docks, cooed in the apothecary, and sung by children on the playground. Those Casper lilies, the story went, are filled to the brim with what we’ve lost. Like snakes, the townsfolk shed their innocence, leaving it to stew in the bay, sink into the soil, and beat against the lighthouse. And like snakes, the lilies drew their outgrown magic into tangled roots and narrow stems and gilded pollen: an ouroboros consuming itself.
Most people refused to use the term—magic—but Ethan found it appropriate. Harvesting long-gone energy from a living thing felt like its very definition. Using said magic to reanimate a corpse felt less like magic, though, and more like recklessness.
He yelped and flailed before he hit the water, bracing for the icy shock. Panic shot through him. Salt water rushed into his nostrils and seaweed snagged his ankle. Swim, idiot. November wind nipped his face when he breached, sucking at the air, clutching drenched flowers to his chest. Casper lilies never promised to be easy, of course. But Ethan Shaw still cursed as he slushed through tidepools and mud. He sighed, relieved, when his soggy shoes hit the gravel path outside the tower.
“We need a lightkeeper, Ethan,” he mocked, shouldering through the wooden door. He left his boots in a puddle on the cheeky welcome mat: YOU BETTER BE BEER! “It’s a solid wage, Ethan. Not like it’s a—” The first knife clattered on the rectangular table, then the second. Sopping flowers landed with a splat next to an unopened power bill. “—hard gig, Ethan. Just take it.” He whined through the last three words, mimicking his mother, and trudged into the washroom.
He hadn’t the time for a bath, so he peeled the wet shirt from his back, unzipped his jeans, and wrestled his way out of his drenched binder. The chilly water had reddened his beige skin and left his boyish face chapped and raw. Droplets clung to his chestnut hair, shorn behind his ears and around the back of his skull, and worn long at his crown, hanging in messy strings over his brow. He slicked his hair back with an annoyed swipe and scrubbed lingering sea grime away with a warm, damp cloth. He dried with a towel scented like gardenia and tobacco, like Peter, and set his palms on the vanity, studying his reflection. Rabbit-framed, small-chested, wide-hipped, and delicately masculine, Ethan Shaw wasn’t the optimal lightkeeper type, per se. He hadn’t a beard, only annoying stubble, and carried himself on dainty, soft-pawed feet. Much as the townsfolk whispered about lilies, they whispered about him too.
Witch—hissed like a match strike in the nave and murmured by joggers at the park—wasn’t entirely untrue, but Ethan still preferred friendlier terminology. Alchemist, maybe. Magician, even.
“Take the job, Ethan,” he mumbled and huffed at the mirror. “Surely the lifestyle suits you.”
A job doing, literally, anything else would’ve suited him better.
Distantly, the front door heaved open, and the clip-clopping of heavy boots filled the living quarters. “Why is the floor wet?” Peter repeated the question, hollering through the lighthouse, “Darling, why is the floor wet?”
Ethan rolled his eyes. “I slipped,” he called, toeing the washroom door ajar.
Peter rounded the doorframe, square glasses crooked on his hawkish nose. Surprise shot to his face, but the expression faded, chased away by a frown. “You didn’t,” he warned, snaring Ethan’s reflection in a hard glare. “Ethan, we talked about this—”
“I don’t need your permission,” he snapped and slipped past Peter, striding confidently into the adjacent bedroom. Their clothes were heaped in the wicker hamper, the dresser littered with photographs—some framed, some not—half-empty cologne bottles, and stained coffee mugs. He opened a drawer and fingered through his clothes, settling on a brick-red sweater and corduroy trousers. “I’ve got the flowers; I know the ritual. Either have faith in me, or say I told you so if it doesn’t work, but hovering like a…” He batted at Peter’s broad chest. “Damn moth won’t change my mind. How was work?”
“Long,” Peter bit out. “Choppy water makes for terrible fishing, as you know. Even the local wildlife can’t handle the riptide—as you know—and consistently get thrown ashore, as you know, and—”
“You brought it home, not me.”
“I brought it home while it was still breathing,” Peter said, exasperated. He trailed Ethan into the closet, craning over him while he searched for wool socks—matching, preferably—and then into the kitchen, sighing stupidly, dramatically, at the waterlogged lilies. “Where’d you put the poor thing, anyway? Is it still in the garden shed?”
“No, I tossed it in the bathtub—yes, of course, it’s in the garden shed, Peter. You think I’d let a selkie loose in our home? Give me some credit.”
“Okay, wait, hold on—wait.” Peter snatched for his hand, feebly attempting to catch him while he bounced around the kitchen, yanked a bowl out of the cabinet, slid both knives behind his leather belt, unfastened the lavender from a rope above the sink, and stuffed his mortar and pestle underneath his arm. Before Ethan could make for the door, two palms clasped his waist, turning him, and his beautiful, ridiculous husband wrinkled his nose. His copper cheeks were sea-bitten, angular bones pressing hard against his skin. As always, Peter Vásquez looked dashing and exhausted and very, very worried. “Ay Dios mio, just wait, okay?”
Ethan arched an eyebrow. After a long, strangled pause, he lifted onto his tiptoes. “You brought it home,” he whispered and pecked Peter on the lips.
“It’s a leopard seal, Ethan. Not a selkie,” he said patiently, as he would to a toddler. “And it’s dead because animals that get caught in bad weather sometimes die.”
Ethan patted his cheek. “Sure, yeah. So, the next time you’re caught in bad weather and someone plops you on my doorstep, I’ll cash in your life insurance and call it a day. How’s that sound?”
Peter winced. “You’re impossible.”
“And you’re in my way.” Perhaps that was a little too far, considering. But impossible? Ethan scoffed. He wasn’t the one who’d mistaken a fae-beast—an extraordinarily obvious fae-beast, by the way—for a run-of-the-mill seal, and he wasn’t the one who’d whimpered when said not-seal had stopped breathing, and he certainly wasn’t the one who’d dragged a goddamn selkie home from work.
He narrowed his eyes, stepping around Peter’s broad frame. “Stay here if you want, but if I don’t give it the option to remove its pelt before morning, it’ll stay dead. Right now, I have the chance to bring it back, whoever it is, and I’d rather not deal with a rotting corpse if I can help it. So—” He tucked the herb bundle and his tools inside the mixing bowl and carefully lifted his leather-bound grimoire from the wooden holder on the countertop. “Stay or come. Your choice.”
Peter fiddled with the frayed bottom of his scarf. His buzz-cut was covered by a slouchy beanie, pursed lips framed by a short, neatly kept beard. Dark-eyed, dark-haired, and irritatingly tall, he radiated the utmost warmth. Even then, as he gave his best attempt at sharpening, Peter granted Ethan a slow, condescending once-over, and his stony face softened. “What if it bites you,” he muttered, and straightened his glasses with a bent knuckle.
“My mother’s exact words after I told her we were engaged,” Ethan teased. He stepped into a pair of Birkenstocks, straps loose and floppy atop his feet, and shuffled through the front door. “C’mon, then. Let’s go.”
Reluctantly, Peter followed, catching the door with his boot before it swung into Ethan’s shoulder. “Impossible.”
Ethan shot him a narrow-eyed glance.
As it turned out, marriage wasn’t exactly what everyone made it out to be. It was coexisting in the same place, building bridges when arguments landed like grenades, worrying ceaselessly about each other, being irrevocably consumed by one another. Marriage in the fiscal sense? Simple. Money could be made and tracked and divided. Marriage in the lifetime sense? Complicated. Because love was indomitable, but it could be lost and ruined and squandered.
“Give me that,” Peter grumbled. He plucked the unsteady grimoire from the crook of Ethan’s elbow, allowing the crowded bowl to sit more comfortably in his arms.
Ethan sighed through his nose, and said, very quietly, “Thank you.”
Marriage was intrusive and messy, but somehow, Peter Vásquez made it easy.
The garden shed hugged the backside of the lighthouse, a small, lonesome thing overgrown with white sage. Ethan stepped over a wandering pumpkin vine and scanned the planter boxes, brimming with turnips, radishes, bushy spinach, and sweet onion, and swallowed around the tightness in his throat. Like the town gossiped about lilies and witches, it also cautioned against magic—reckless magic, at least. A self-stirring coffee spoon or a vegetable overgrown from a gardening spell didn’t ruffle many feathers. That kind of magic—parlor-trick shit—didn’t cost the practitioner anything more than a headache and numb gums. But reanimation rituals, and bartering spells, and harnessing power from beyond earth’s elemental plane came with bloody price tags, and most people associated witches who practiced that kind of magic with danger. Seeing as Ethan could hardly reach the top shelf in the cupboard, dangerous seemed absurd. He preferred equipped. Knowledgeable, even. Brave or daring or—
“Careful with your wrist, all right? I’d hate to see you scar.” Peter whimpered like a hound.
Ethan inhaled through his nose. He did, truly, love his overbearing husband more than he cared to admit. “It’s only a few drops. Won’t leave a mark, I’m sure.”
Warped wood panels bowed inward, and the sheet metal roof had rusted over, twisting the unassuming garden shed into something spooky and decrepit. Around them, the ocean swayed and crashed, spraying foam across black rocks, muffling the click of a lock sliding free.
“Let me go first,” Peter said.
Ethan squeezed past him and swiped at the air, searching for the lamp string. “Oh, stop. It’s fine.” Rope smacked his palm. He yanked, bathing the small space in artificial light.
Gardening gloves, terracotta pots, propagation jars, and bundled herbs littered the narrow table against the far wall, and various tools—rakes, shears, shovels, hoes—were propped in corners. There were bulging bags of organic soil, a bucket filled with assorted seed packets, and in the center of the room, a ratty blanket carried back from The Oyster, Peter’s fishing rig, and an unnaturally still selkie resting atop it.
“Oh, look,” Peter mumbled. “A dead seal.”
“If it was dead, we’d smell it.”
“Or the saltwater delayed rigor mortis—Ethan, please—”
“Stay or go, but if you keep whining, I will scream. I swear to God, Peter, they’ll hear it on Berkshire Street. I’m not even—”
“All right, okay—fuck, just…” He tiptoed around the spotted body on the floor and dropped the grimoire on the table. “Get on with it, then.”
Get on with it. Ethan snorted, mirroring Peter’s path. At the table, he emptied the bowl and unsheathed the curved knife. The lilies came apart easily, peeled back like delicate skin where the stem thinned at each flower’s blooming head. Pollen dusted his fingertips—orange and mauve and stormy silver. Once the Casper lilies were disassembled and placed inside the mortar, he brushed dried lavender atop them, scenting the air like fresh laundry. Next, he dug the pestle into the floral concoction. Crushed and ground and kneaded until the lilies and lavender formed a chunky, perfumy paste, and flipped open his grimoire with two fingers.
“Have you ever done something like this?” Peter asked, peering over his shoulder.
“Not quite, no. I managed to restart your heart after Katia though. Same concept, different body.” He kept his attention fixed to his old spell book and ignored the twinge of fear that followed her name. Hurricane Katia. The storm that’d torn Peter’s boat to pieces, cut his crew from ten to six, and swallowed him whole. Ethan remembered how the pocketknife had slipped across his arm, how his blood had darkened Peter’s mouth, how the sea had jolted from between his husband’s blue lips. He’d begged the water to go. Traded a bit of himself to evacuate it. Three years ago, kneeling on the docks while hail pelted Casper, Ethan Shaw had deemed himself miraculous and deadly.
Townsfolk called him witch, as they always had, but after that, they called him necromancer too.
Peter gripped Ethan’s hipbone and leaned closer, resting his chin on the slope of his shoulder. “I’d only been out a few hours…” His breath coasted Ethan’s throat. “But I hear you.”
Out. Ethan wouldn’t bother correcting him—he never did. Dead was the right word, though. Deceased, gone, passed. He flipped to a sallow page titled RESURGENCE and dragged his index finger along the scribbled spell:
1. Innocence harvested by or from the practitioner—sacrificial, floral, bodily, or spiritually
2. Connective tissue—flesh: earthen or feather
3. Binding blood—practitioner offering
To bring back a living being, human or not, a witch needed to bind the spell with blood—their own or someone else’s. To bring back a fae-beast who had died in a singular form but could potentially be clinging to life in another? That required the practitioner’s blood, exclusively. Potency that couldn’t be replicated and rarity that couldn’t be found elsewhere. Despite having full confidence in his blood, Ethan had never attempted to fashion a spell with Casper lilies, and he hoped the gossip was as furiously true as it was prevalent.
“Easy enough,” Ethan mumbled. He turned, bumping his upturned nose against Peter’s forehead. “Sorry, dear, but you need to move.”
Peter huffed, annoyed, and stepped away. He gave the selkie a wide berth and went to stand at the far corner of the shed. Arms folded, mouth tensed into a frown, watchful gaze burning holes into Ethan’s back. “Careful,” he said again, as he tended to do.
